By David Roach - Posted at Baptist Press:
Published November 14, 2025
NASHVILLE (BP) – Abel Garcia thought he finally would be happy after gender transition surgery. But the first three months of trying to live as a women left him empty. That’s when he drew a startling conclusion: he wanted to live as a man again.“It all came crashing down like an avalanche one day,” Garcia said, “and I had to ask myself, ‘What am I doing?’” That launched him into a battle to fix his broken life.
“I’m just working on trying to live my life,” he said in an episode of The World and Everything in It podcast, “and to do the best that I can to live as a man.”
Garcia is not alone, according to a study by British researcher Erik Kaufmann. He concluded the percentage of American young adults identifying as transgender has decreased by nearly 50 percent since 2023.
“Trans, queer and bisexual identities are in rapid decline among young educated Americans,” Kaufmann wrote.
Christian analysts have responded with cautious optimism. Some question Kaufmann’s research methodology. Yet if the number of young Americans identifying as transgender is trending downward, evangelical experts on transgenderism say it is time to ramp up ministry to those with gender confusion.
Kaufmann, professor of politics at the University of Buckingham, drew data from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s annual survey of some 60,000 undergraduate students and from a Higher Education Research Institute survey. He wrote that “the transgender share among university students peaked in 2023 and has almost halved since, from nearly 7 percent to under 4 percent.”
Today’s college freshmen are less likely to identify as bisexual, transgender or queer than seniors, he stated, “suggesting that the decline will continue.”